Faithful Translations Research Articles

Problems of Translating annaa (أنى) in the Holy Quran

The present study endeavours to examine the challenges associated with translating the particle annaa from the Holy Quran into English, with a focus on three English translators of the Quran. The study identifies the multifaceted functions of annaa in Arabic grammar and its rhetorical functions within the Quranic context. Key challenges include conveying nuanced meanings, selecting appropriate modal verbs, and preserving rhetorical functions. The study emphasizes the need for a context-aware approach and the need to consult with authentic exegeses to ensure accurate and faithful translations.

Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Literary Translation in the Age of AI: Striking a Balance Between Human Expertise and Machine Power

This paper explores the evolving role of teachers and literary translators in the era of artificial intelligence and machine translation and addresses the challenges encountered in literary translation. It focuses on achieving a balance between human expertise and machine power to ensure faithful translations of literary works while preserving their inherent artistic value. The study analyses four translations of an excerpt from the short story “Lake Como” by Serbian writer Srđan Valjarević. These translations, from Serbian to English, were conducted in groups by third-year Anglistics students at the Faculty of Philology, Sinergija University in Bijeljina, whose native language is Serbian. The quality and accuracy of the translations were assessed, accompanied by detailed justifications of our preference judgments. A comparison was made between our assessments and those generated by Chat GPT-3, aiming to provide insights into the advancements made by AI in the realm of literary translation. This comprehensive evaluation of translations, encompassing both human translators and AI-powered language models (LLMs), offers a deeper understanding of the specific strengths and weaknesses exhibited by LLMs in the context of literary translation. Through this human evaluation process, we strive to shed light on the specific areas where LLM translators excel and identify the challenges they are still facing. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of AI's impact on literary translation and pave the way for future research and advancements in this area.

Reasoning with belief functions over Belnap–Dunn logic

We design an expansion of Belnap–Dunn logic with belief and plausibility functions that allows non-trivial reasoning with contradictory and incomplete probabilistic information. We also formalise reasoning with non-standard probabilities and belief functions in two ways. First, using a calculus of linear inequalities, akin to the one presented in [23]. Second, as a two-layered modal logic wherein reasoning with evidence (the outer layer) utilises paraconsistent expansions of Łukasiewicz logic. The second approach is inspired by [3]. We prove completeness for both kinds of calculi and show their equivalence by establishing faithful translations in both directions.

A Requiem for Women: Narrative Strategy, Rhetoric, and Ideology in Candrāvatī’s Bengali Rāmāyaṇa

Abstract The numerous versions of Vālmīki’s original Rāmāyaṇa in different languages and milieus display an almost limitless cultural and ideological variety. Whether purportedly faithful translations or interpretive re-creations, these versions present a vast range of responses to a narrative that has been often transformed to reflect contemporary social and spiritual experiences and positions. A particularly intriguing example of such a transformation is the late 15th c. Bengali Rāmāyaṇa of Candrāvatī, of interest not only because this is the first extant work by a female author in the tradition of Bengali poetry but more importantly because (i) she composed the narrative from a woman’s point of view, and (ii) she converted the original battle narrative into a dirge for the victims of war, especially women. In her poem the validation of war and conquest is set aside, justice is shown to be unjust, and even faith as a spiritual axiom is undermined. Candrāvatī’s literary strategy, including her diction, iterative statements and lyrical forms, replaces the heroic style of the conventional epic with the language of feminine domesticity. The Rāmāyaṇa is thus turned against itself emotionally and ideologically by being reoriented to women’s repeatedly authenticated experience of the world. My essay traces through the literary and ideological processes of Candrāvatī’s poem its assault upon the chains that bind women as victims of justice perverted in the dominant Rāma legend. Whether and how far that assault also affects the integrity of religious faith lends a speculative edge to my enquiry.

TEMPORAL INTERPRETATION OF MONADIC INTUITIONISTIC QUANTIFIERS

AbstractWe show that monadic intuitionistic quantifiers admit the following temporal interpretation: “always in the future” (for $\forall $ ) and “sometime in the past” (for $\exists $ ). It is well known that Prior’s intuitionistic modal logic ${\sf MIPC}$ axiomatizes the monadic fragment of the intuitionistic predicate logic, and that ${\sf MIPC}$ is translated fully and faithfully into the monadic fragment ${\sf MS4}$ of the predicate ${\sf S4}$ via the Gödel translation. To realize the temporal interpretation mentioned above, we introduce a new tense extension ${\sf TS4}$ of ${\sf S4}$ and provide a full and faithful translation of ${\sf MIPC}$ into ${\sf TS4}$ . We compare this new translation of ${\sf MIPC}$ with the Gödel translation by showing that both ${\sf TS4}$ and ${\sf MS4}$ can be translated fully and faithfully into a tense extension of ${\sf MS4}$ , which we denote by ${\sf MS4.t}$ . This is done by utilizing the relational semantics for these logics. As a result, we arrive at the diagram of full and faithful translations shown in Figure 1 which is commutative up to logical equivalence. We prove the finite model property (fmp) for ${\sf MS4.t}$ using algebraic semantics, and show that the fmp for the other logics involved can be derived as a consequence of the fullness and faithfulness of the translations considered.

Adaptable-translation, pseudotranslation, and translation from the perspective of Buddhistsutratranslations in early medieval China

AbstractThis article provides an early medieval Chinese perspective to further the discussion of adaptation, pseudotranslation, and translation. During the first to the fifth centuries CE, Chinese translation of Buddhistsutrasincluded some unconventional practices. Translators either rendered source texts that were incomplete or partially rendered the complete source texts in their possession. The works were accepted as faithful translations of genuine sources from India and helped disseminate Buddhism, though theoretically, believers would only accept literal translations ofsutras. Based on Bastin’s conceptualization of adaptation and the features of Buddhist translations, I have labeled it as “adaptable-translation” and argue that in early medieval China, there were adaptable-translations with pseudotranslation elements and adaptable-translations with the nature of pseudotranslation. Detailed analysis and case studies of five specific modes of “adaptable-translation” will show how they differ from “adaptation” of Bastin and “pseudotranslation” of Toury or Bassnett. Based on the analysis, I argue that a judgment of the nature of a text as a “translation” can be both qualitative and quantitative.

The English Translations of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi: A translational textual analysis

The study aims to find out the reader-centred & author-centred translation of Ashtadhyayi of Panini, an Indian linguist of 5th century BC, who compiled the world oldest, shortest and ever first linguistic book in Sanskrit language focusing on all linguistic aspects, aiming at protecting the sounds of Vedas; the holy book of Hinduism. The linguistic importance of Sanskrit was firstly mentioned by William Jones during his famous address in India, whereas the linguistic phenomena were discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure in nineteenth century. The book is first translated into English in 1891by Sarisa Chandra Vasu with a large number of Sanskrit Words which gained a momentous fame in all the linguistic circles. Due to which Ashtadhyayi was studied widely by English professors and students illuminating their linguistic horizons by coining unique ambiguous precise 4000 rules under the name of ‘Sutra’. Just after this English translational creation of Ashtadhyayi a large number of translations were done by the native Hindu scholars and even by western Sanskritests. Therefore, a huge number of commentaries, studies and articles were written by European and native linguists and at the same time it was translated into other languages. The book and all its translations are available online. The purpose of this paper is to collect all the English translations of Ashtadhyayi throughout the history since 5th BC to the age of globalization and digitalization, then putting them into a translational categorization according to various kinds of translations finding out the most comprehensive and faithful translations among them and the types of translation strategies applied by the translators in translating this unique cryptic linguistic book.

Manga Translation and Censorship Issues in Malaysia

In manga translation, when original image and written representations are regarded as inappropriate content to the target readers’ socio-cultural context, censorship is imposed. Nevertheless, research on censorship in manga translation in Malaysia has not been given due attention. Previous studies show that self-censorship influences translation, but it is not examined within the scope of manga translation. As such, the objective of this study is to examine the censorship practices in manga translation in Malaysia. This study adopts a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse six Malay translations and their respective source texts based on the publishing guideline of the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 [Act 301] and translation procedures proposed by Klaus Kaindl. The analysis shows that the censorship practice in manga translation is a combination of institutional and self-censorship. In institutional censorship, the translation procedures of detraction, addition, substitution, deletion and couplets are used, while in self-censorship, the process is involves substitution, deletion and addition. The current study recommends the adoption of institutional censorship procedures as guidelines in handling sensitive representations and a review of the self-censorship procedures to ensure faithful translations.

Aspects of the Never-Ending Translation Wars in South Korea

Abstract Translation has always played a major role in Korea’s often painful process of modernization. But even in this context, the frequent “translation wars” are a striking phenomenon—especially when the zealous battles about mistranslations are fought not only within the limited confines of professional or aficionado circles, but also (as periodically occurs) captivate the general public. The fact that public discourse about the quality and reliability of translations is much more common in South Korea than anywhere in the West is very telling in cultural anthropological terms. This significance has, however, never been considered a matter deserving of academic attention in and of itself. Conspicuously, the public denunciation of translation mistakes, as practiced in Korea, often targets not only the immediate culprits but claims to expose a fundamental (culturally conditioned) mentality among the general Korean population. The implication is that Korean audiences lack self-assurance and tend to accept dubious passages meekly because they are conditioned to suspect themselves of being simply too stupid to understand. Korea’s ongoing translation wars are epitomized by encyclopedic books that present vast collections of detected mistakes and usually receive a great deal of media coverage. One regularly recurring motif of the multifaceted debates on mistranslations is the supposed disgrace and disadvantage sustained by Koreans when they are left with imperfect renderings of insights easily gleaned by those elsewhere in the world, who read, if not the originals, at least perfectly faithful translations.

Edwin Morgan and Russian Poetry

ABSTRACT Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), first poet laureate (makar) of Scotland, was a prolific translator of poetry from about twenty European languages into both Scots and English. Translations from Russian bulk large in his Collected Translations (1996). The most famous of these is Wi the Haill Voice, his vigorous and inventive transposition of Mayakovsky into Scots. This work is examined here, alongside Morgan’s always faithful translations from Pushkin and from two very different younger contemporaries, Voznesensky and Aygi.

Il rapporto con l’originale nel rifacimento in ottava rima del Candido attribuito a Gaetano Marré

During the second half of the 18th century, the reception of the nascent English novel and the French philosophical novel in the Savoy and Veneto areas manifested itself in a variety of ways, e.g. through readings in the original language (as demonstrated by paratextual documentation) and faithful translations by lesser known literati, as well as through more radical adaptations (e.g. Goldoni’s Pamela) by authors of varying levels of repute. Such was the case with Voltaire’s Candide, which was unhappily rendered in ottava rima by the Ligurian jurist Gaetano Marré. This is nonetheless an interesting example of how fidelity to tradition and rhetorical and stylistic models tended to prevail over respect for the genre of a modern foreign text, framing it in an archaic form and even reinterpreting some of its content. This article seeks to offer a detailed overview of the non-conservative renditions and the intertextual caprices to be found in the above-mentioned reworking of Voltaire’s masterpiece, published anonymously in Genoa in 1797.

Traduzioni belles infidèles. Commenti a quelle dei componimenti lubrici di Domenico Tempio

Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
 

A Study on the Europeanization of the Chinese Language in Sci-Tech Translation Based on Skopos Theory

As a bridge of scientific and technological communication between China and other countries, sci-tech translation is of great significance in promoting the social development of China in the current situation. Europeanization, particularly in sci-tech translation, refers to the general name of new expressions and sentence patterns emerged under the influence of European languages, especially English. From the perspective of Skopos theory and its core element (paying attention to the target addressees), this paper attempts to analyze Europeanization in sci-tech translation and to predict its future development and application, so that translators could get a better understanding of its present situation and prospect, and thus produce more idiomatic and faithful translations that achieve communicative goals better. This will finally contribute to the development of both theoretical research and practice of sci-tech translation.

Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England

With Faithful Translators Jaime Goodrich offers the first in-depth examination of women's devotional translations and of religious translations in general within early modern England. Placing female translators such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, alongside their male counterparts, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, Goodrich argues that both male and female translators constructed authorial poses that allowed their works to serve four distinct cultural functions: creating privacy, spreading propaganda, providing counsel, and representing religious groups. Ultimately, Faithful Translators calls for a reconsideration of the apparent simplicity of faithful translations and aims to reconfigure perceptions of early modern authorship, translation, and women writers.

Faithful Translations?: Cross-Cultural Communication in Canadian Religious Freedom Litigation

Faithful Translations?: Cross-Cultural Communication in Canadian Religious Freedom Litigation

Review

Reviewed by: The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition trans. by Jack Zipes, and: The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales: A New Translation of the 1812 First Edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen / Children’s and Household Tales, Collected Through the Brothers Grimm trans. by Oliver Loo Marc Pierce (bio) The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. xlv + 519 pp. The Original 1812 Grimm Fairy Tales: A New Translation of the 1812 First Edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen / Children’s and Household Tales, Collected Through the Brothers Grimm, Volume 1, 200 Year Anniversary Edition. Translated by Oliver Loo. Self-published, 2014. 607 pp. Although a number of English translations of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen are available, up to this point there has been no complete English translation of the first edition (volume 1, 1812; volume 2, 1815). This gap has now been filled with the appearance of the two books reviewed here, by Jack Zipes and Oliver Loo. These books are different in almost every way. For example, Zipes’s translation covers both volumes of the first edition, whereas Loo’s covers only the first volume; Zipes is one of the best-known scholars on the Brothers Grimm today, whereas Loo is an independent scholar; Zipes’s translation is published by a well-respected university press (Princeton), whereas Loo’s translation is self-published; and Zipes’s translation is (very nicely) illustrated (by Andrea Dezsö), whereas Loo’s is not. In addition, the two authors have quite different philosophies of translation. This last difference necessitates further commentary, because it directly affects the quality of the two translations. Zipes writes: I have endeavored to capture the tone and style of the different tales by translating them into a basic contemporary American idiom. My main objective was to render the frank and blunt qualities of the tales in a succinct American English. . . . The Grimm’s tales, though diverse and not their own, share an innocent and naïve morality that pervades their works. It is this quality that I have tried to communicate in my translation. (xlv) [End Page 356] In contrast to Zipes’s more idiomatic translation, Loo contends that other translators invariably deviate somehow from the originals. He rejects this approach in favor of a much more literal translation: What my translations aim to be are faithful translations of the first edition from 1812 translated as closely as possible from the original German text without additions, modifications, or removals of text. I really do mean faithful. I will say that they are accurate and authentic. My translations can be compared line by line with the original text. No words were added or deleted or changed from the text, except minor changes for clarity. Nothing was censored. Nothing was rewritten. The stories appear almost exactly as they were written in 1812. (xxi) To illustrate the results of these differing philosophies, consider the following passages, beginning with the very first sentence of the introduction. The German original reads, “Wir finden es wohl, wenn Sturm oder anderes Unglück, vom Himmel geschickt, eine ganze Saat zu Boden geschlagen, daß noch bein niedrigen Hecken oder Sträuchen, die am Wege stehen, ein kleiner Platz sich gesichert und einzelne Aehren aufrecht geblieben sind” (qtd. from Kinder- und Hausmärchen, gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, vergrößerter Nachdruck der zweibändigen Erstausgabe von 1812 und 1815 . . . von Heinz Rölleke in Verbindung mit Ulrike Marquardt [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986], Band I, Seite V). Zipes translates this passage as “When a storm, or some other catastrophe sent from the heavens, levels an entire crop, we are relieved to find that a small patch, protected by tiny hedges of bushes, has been spared and that some solitary stalks remain standing” (3). Loo, on the other hand, translates it as, “We find it well, if storm or other misfortune, from heaven sent, a whole seed has strewn to ground, that still by low hedges or bushes, that stand at the way, a small place is secured and single ears still...

Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards

This essay compares two neglected German translations of Jonathan Edwards's famousFaithful Narrative(1737). Both were published in 1738 but by different circles of German Pietists—one Lutheran and centered around Halle, one Reformed and located in the Nether Rhine area. Both were more intimately woven into transatlantic evangelical communication networks than has been understood. Each version show that the news about the American awakening was received enthusiastically as an encouraging sign of God's advancing kingdom, a model for inner-churchly revivals, and an argument for the legitimacy of Pietist conventicles at home. Comparing the two translations also reveals how Edwards was appropriated in quite divergent ways and with varying attitudes by the two groups, reflecting their distinct regional, denominational and social contexts, as well as specific religious needs and dogmatic emphases. While both texts evince that German Pietism very much partook in the emergence of a transatlantic evangelical consciousness, they simultaneously show how the formation of such an ecumenical identity was complicated by persisting confessional and regional differences. Finally, the two German translations of Edwards's narrative illustrate that the meaning of these revivals as part of a larger Protestant evangelical awakening was negotiated not only among Anglo-American evangelicals but also among Continental Pietists.

Modalities of Western Enlightenment Text Translation in the 18th Century Romanian Culture

Western European Enlightenment had a considerable influence upon the Romanian Provinces. Despite unfavourable political, historical and geographical conditions, the Romanian scholars were attracted and influenced by Enlightenment ideas. In this context, books, that held a very important part, had to be translated in order to be put at the disposal of potential beneficiaries. In the 18th century, translation fidelity principles with respect to the original text were not rigorously established and translators used to intervene to comply with the needs of the recipients of their work. At the beginning, the contact with western books was intermediated by other languages, as the Romanian translators could not have access to original writings but only to their translations into Greek, German, Polish or Russian, translations already unfaithful by themselves. Towards the end of the 18th century, a political easing period allowed intellectuals to directly obtain the original writings. According to the faithfulness to the original, we observed and comment several types of intervention by the translator: compressions, omissions, alternation of prose and verse, selective translations, adaptations, elaborations, summarization etc. The paper also presents the way they mixed in some translations used as examples (Cornaro, Delaporte, Fontenelle, Botero, Halima). Though some faithful translations existed the modern concept of respect for the original text has been implemented by the Romanian scholars starting with the 19th century. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p623

Recueils de mimes et de sentences destinés à l’éducation des jeunes princes à la Renaissance

When Charles Fontaine, in 1557-1558, offered the four sons of Henri II the translation of four collections of texts of ancient wisdom, he joined a vast pedagogical movement which had long destined these texts for young children, with the double aim of transmitting knowledge and educating princes. Fontaine’s humanist education led him to rely on the texts which Erasmus had reshaped, gathered and circulated in Etienne Dolet’s Latin edition of 1538. Charles Fontaine delivered these texts to the young princes, often with commentaries aimed at extracting their particular “salt”, and in faithful translations which met the demands of the humanist instructors at Henri II’s court, who proved the worthy successor to Francis I in this educational enterprise.

Mahšīd Amīršāhī's Afsānehā-ye Īrānī-ye ‘aṣr-e mā und James G. Thurber's Fables for Our Time

The Persian author Mahšīd Amīršāhī has dealt with Fables for Our Time by the American writer James G. Thurber (1894–1961) over several decades. In 1966, her Persian translations of the fables were published in Tehran. In 2001–2002 some of these fables were printed in the London Persian weekly Nīmrūz. The fables in Nīmrūz were not, however, faithful translations of Thurber's, but „free translations” as Amīršāhī calls her adaptations of his fables for her own ends. Amīršāhī has adapted Thurber's fables, which were published as an impression of life in the USA from between the World Wars until the McCarthy era, to make her own comments on the history of and living conditions in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This article provides a comparative study of Thurber's original fables and Amīršāhī's versions in Nīmrūz (and later) and of the narrative instruments employed by Amīršāhī for the appropriation of Thurber's materials to a contemporary Iranian setting. The article discusses their effects within the typological framework of the fable as a genre.